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Document Imaging
Imagine a filing system where files never get lost. Where many people can share a file at the same time. Where you can search for a file by client name, customer number, invoice date or any word that might be in the document. A magical file cabinet where you could find all documents that reference a certain product that you sold in 1999. A file cabinet that you could access without leaving your desk!

Wouldn't That Be Great?
Of course it would. We're getting overloaded with information and most of it comes on paper. If you don't think that paper is becoming a problem, check out these interesting facts:

Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50%
looking for it.
The average office worker uses 250 pounds of paper and spends 40 to 60% of their time creating or working with documents.
Paper costs U.S. business $100 billion a year.
90% of corporate memory exists on paper.
Of all the pages that get handled each day in the average office, 90% are merely shuffled.
The average document gets copied 19 times.
Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.*
7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled.*
There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone – growing at a rate of 22% per year.*
A 36GB disk drive can hold the electronic equivalent of 40 4-drawer filing cabinets and costs less than $300!

*source: Coopers & Lybrand

What is Document Imaging?
Document imaging (also referred to as electronic records management) is the conversion of paper documents into electronic images that are stored on your computer, where they can be retrieved effortlessly in seconds. If your organization is like most others, it generates and receives large amounts of paper and electronic documents. No matter what kind of “special” filing system you have developed to store your important files, files still get lost. Everyone knows the frustration of not being able to find a file when we need it most. Traditional methods of storing paper and electronic records require a great deal of effort to manage, distribute and find those documents. As the number of files grows, the time and effort required to manage them also increases. Paper is also susceptible to loss through fire, flood, earthquake and other catastrophes.

Document Management:

Prevents lost records
Saves storage space
Makes images centrally available
Manage records easily
Eliminate the need for file cabinets
Increases productivity
Instant document retrieval

Document imaging revolutionizes the archival of information and gives you the capability to rapidly retrieve, share and protect all documents in your system. Document imaging systems have five basic components:

Scanning and importing tools to bring documents into the system
A method for storing and archiving documents
An indexing system to organize documents
Retrieval tools to find documents
A security system that can restrict feature and access rights

Our systems build on the strong points of paper documents. Files are scanned or electronically converted and a high resolution electronic image is stored on a hard drive or optical disk. Electronic “index cards” can attach information to a document such as date created, author, account number or type of account. You can then search on any of this “index” information.

Documents can also be “read” by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Once a document has been OCRed, every word in the document is indexed and you can find the document by keying in any word or phrase that is in the document.

Which documents people can read, and what actions or
modifications they can perform on these documents, depends
on their level of security, which is controlled by the document
imaging system and the rules set up by your system
administrator.

data entry, forms processing, scanning, and remittance/payment processing

complex data entry, document imaging and data processing